The fugitive’s return to his home country was fatal: 45 years after a former military officer was involved in the murder of the then Prime Minister of Bangladesh, he was hanged a few days after his arrest.
Bangladesh executed a former military officer for the murder of the founder of state Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1975. According to prison official Mahbub Alam, 69-year-old Abdul Majed was hanged in a prison in the capital Dhaka shortly after midnight (local time) on Sunday.
The police caught the man on Tuesday. He has been volatile since a court sentenced him and 14 other people to death in 1998. The Supreme Court upheld the death penalty for twelve of them in 2009 and acquitted the rest.
President Abdul Hamid had rejected Majed’s petition for mercy on Thursday. The former officer had been hiding in Calcutta, India for at least the past 21 years, according to a prosecutor’s representative, and had returned at the end of last month.
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was the country’s first prime minister after independence from Pakistan in 1971. Officers had murdered him in 1975. The military then ruled the impoverished South Asian country for 15 years. Law enforcement began only after Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s daughter Sheikh Hasina became prime minister in 1996.
Five convicts were executed in 2010 after Hasina took over as head of government for the second time. Seven others were found in different countries, one of them died in Zimbabwe in 2002, according to the Bangladesh State Department. Sheikh Hasina is now in her fourth term as Prime Minister of Bangladesh.
